Haunted Mansion ending explained, with full backstory for iconic ride characters
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Warning: This story contains spoilers from Disney's Haunted Mansion.
Disney's new Haunted Mansion movie doesn't end with room for just one more unlucky spirit; it concludes in a dining hall filled with several jovial attendees of a ghostly jubilee, not unlike the one riders encounter at versions of the classic ride operating at parks around the world. Fans of the Walt Disney-devised attraction, however, will similarly rejoice after seeing the film, as director Justin Simien and writer Katie Dippold finished the film with a fleshed-out backstory for two fan-favorite canon characters: William Gracey — whose identity is sometimes confused with that of the "Ghost Host" ride narrator in certain attraction lore, including the 2003 Eddie Murphy movie — and Jared Leto's endlessly creepy Hatbox Ghost.
"How can you not make the movie about Hatbox Ghost and Gracey?" Simien — a former Disney parks employee and full-time Disneyland aficionado — asks during an interview with EW. "I'm a real fan of the ride. I probably would be classified as a Disney Adult if I wasn't making movies for a living. Those are the faces you're immediately drawn to."
Riders might easily recognize Gracey and Hatbox Ghost from the attraction, but the movie takes their stories one step further, expanding their personal lore far more explicitly than anything in versions of the experience operating at Disneyland, Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland.
Walt Disney Studios Jared Leto's Hatbox Ghost in 'Haunted Mansion'
The film's central plot follows a grieving widower and paranormal tour guide, Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), who's hired by a single mother (Rosario Dawson) to help her banish invading ghosts from her newly purchased Louisiana estate (modeled for the film exclusively after Disneyland's iteration of the ride). Along the way, he teams with a ragtag group of supernatural sleuths, including Father Kent (Owen Wilson), Professor Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito), and a New Orleans psychic named Harriet (Tiffany Haddish). Together, they uncover a crystal ball inhabited by the head of legendary medium Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis), another legendary staple from the ride, who informs them that most of the ghosts aren't actually nefarious in nature. Here's where Gracey's story comes in.
Leota tells the group that she once worked with Gracey, the prior owner of the mansion, to help him contact his deceased wife, but a dark spirit latched on to his grief, promising to reunite him with his former spouse. Believing the force's word, Gracey commits suicide (as the Ghost Host/Hatchet Man, a separate character, does at the top of the stretching room in the Haunted Mansion ride queue, indicated by the corpse hanging from the rafters). It's later revealed that Hatbox Ghost is actually the spirit of a man named Alistair Crump, who's on a mission to collect 1,000 souls (his current total stands at 999 happy haunts) in order to set him free from a sort of supernatural purgatory.
Crump's origin story is far more sinister. It begins with his father kicking him out of Crump Manor — which is also depicted in the film as a modern-day haunted museum populated by wacky tour guides played by Dan Levy and Winona Ryder — for grieving his deceased mother too deeply. After his father died, Crump returned to the manor and threw lavish parties for the same social circle who previously excommunicated him; in an act of revenge, he began murdering them, until his staff revolted and decapitated him (thus, explaining why his head manifests inside a hatbox, just like it does on the California iteration of the ride). In his final moments, Crump also vowed revenge and became entangled in the 1,000-soul plot.
Disney Owen Wilson, Rosario Dawson, LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish. and Danny DeVito in 'Haunted Mansion'
"Hatbox Ghost, this character, fans of the ride co-created with Disney. They started calling one guy Gracey, and another Hatbox Ghost — now they're canon characters. They pulled Katie and I's attention," Simien explains when asked why he expanded the legacies of both characters.
He adds that, thematically, there was clear motivation to parallel their experiences with Ben's.
"It also was kind of beautiful, because Gracey provided such a Ghost of Future's Past interpretation of Ben's character. Gracey does everything Ben is doing at the start of the story, and it felt like Crump is doing everything if Ben were to keep going on [the] hating people, misanthropic journey he was on. They were these two sorts of things we were watching this character try not to become," Simien observes. "Gracey, the way he confronts his grief, and the way Crump confronts his grief, they're really logical, they're what most of us would do in those situations. Ben has to choose something in the middle to be the hero the movie wants him to be. I thought that was a perfect way to put the audience in the literal seat of the riders, where you're not really of the mansion, but you're a visiting guest, and to give you the candy of what the actual haunts are up to up in there."
Haunted Mansion is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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